Every national cuisine in existence has its own distinct features, flavours, textures and techniques. It’s what gives a country its unique culinary – and in many cases cultural – identity. Korea may share some culinary characteristics with its neighbours, but if you look a little closer it becomes clear that it is home to one of the most distinctive cuisines in all of Asia. In particular, traditional Korean food (known as hansik) simply wouldn’t be the same without an array of unique fermented products that add buckets of depth and complexity to dishes.
History points to the existence of fermented foods in Korea as far back as 1500 BC; evidence of fermented beans have been found in digs of historical Bronze Age sites in the Korean peninsula, suggesting that people were using fermentation in cooking up to 4,000 years ago. Nowadays, ferments are one of the cornerstones of Korean cookery, with many of the country’s most iconic dishes flavoured with fermented sauces and pastes. This collection of ingredients is often referred to as the ‘jangs’ (as the names for them often end in -jang, which roughly translates to ‘sauce’ or ‘paste’) and are regarded as essential ingredients in any Korean kitchen. Although there are loads of different jangs including eojang (made from fermented and brined fish) and cheonggukjang (a fast-fermented bean paste), the three most important are ganjang, doenjang, and gochujang; all of which are made from a block of fermented soybeans called meju.
Traditionally made towards the end of autumn, meju is produced by soaking and then boiling soybeans for between five and six hours. The cooked beans are then dried, crushed and then after a week moulded into large bricks. These soybean blocks are tied and covered in rice straw (the vegetative part of the rice plant), which encourages the growth of mould, before being left to hang and ferment for two to three months. When they’re ready, the bricks are eventually removed from the straw, washed and brined in a saltwater solution, then finally left to ferment for a further month in Korean earthenware pots called onggi. During this time, the concoction separates, producing two of the essential ‘jangs’ – soy sauce (ganjang) and fermented bean paste (doenjang). These two products are then separated and can then be left to age further.
